There’s something on the keyboard that looks like a straight line or a weird
colon that shares the key with \, and that thing is called a pipe (|).
Use of a pipe allows you to combine multiple commands into a single line, and
“piping” allows you to use the output of a command as the input of the
following command.
To use it in the command, hit Shift+\.
One of my most commonly used pipe commands is:
cat rmsd_all.dat | awk '{print 0.1*$1, $2}' > new_rmsd_protein.dat
That command prints out the information from the data file, then prints out only the two columns I want and places it in a new file.
